Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not true, I have 3 static IPs connected to VMs and they charge me for them: External IP Charge on a Standard VM Usage 2021-11-01 2021-11-30 2,XXX.XXX hour 50.XXXXXSEK So ~$2 per IP in USE per month! >gcloud compute addresses list ERROR: (gcloud.compute.addresses.list) Some requests did not succeed: - Request had insufficient authentication scopes. We need to move away from these companies before it's too late.…
I just had to authenticate apparently: NAME REGION ADDRESS STATUS euro europe-west1 X.X.X.X IN_USE asia asia-east1 X.X.X.X IN_USE iowa us-central1 X.X.X.X IN_USE
So "...you are not charged for static external IP addresses that are assigned to forwarding rules", yes, but a VM is not a forwarding rule :P
So you gotta pay for external IPs attached to a VM, but not to a Load Balancer. Seems like they're trying to incentivize using LBs to use less IP addresses, I guess...